Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's air: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
